Strategy Team Charter Template: Decisions Served, Work Refused

Forty-one requests in one quarter

Picture a five-person corporate strategy team that kept a log of every request for one quarter. Forty-one entries. A board deck that needed “a strategic story.” A competitor one-pager for a sales pitch. A quick market size for an investor-day slide. An acquisition screen. A reorganization memo the CEO wanted by Friday. Two requests to “sense-check” a business unit's budget. Each was reasonable. Together they filled every hour.

At the end of the quarter the CEO asked the head of strategy what had happened with the decision on the company's weakest division. Nothing had. Nobody had had time.

A strategy team charter is a one- to two-page agreement, signed by the CEO, that sets out what the strategy team is for: the decisions it exists to improve, the services it provides, the work it will not do, where it reports, the rhythm it works to, and how it will be judged. It is the team's operating model written down.

The thesis of this page is that the charter earns its keep in two lists. The first names the decisions the team serves. The second names the work it will turn down, and who does that work instead. Teams write the first list willingly. The second is the one that protects the first, and it is the one most charters leave out.

A strategy team without a “not ours” list becomes the company's spare capacity for slides.

Why a strategy team needs a charter at all

Most functions have a charter written for them by the work itself. Finance closes the books. Legal reviews the contracts. A strategy team's work is other people's decisions, and decisions do not arrive in a queue. So the team fills with whatever arrives, and the requests that arrive most often are the urgent, small and visible ones.

There is usually a gap the team could fill instead. Michael Mankins observed that in many companies no one is explicitly responsible for managing the leadership team's agenda, and in his survey of top teams at 187 large companies fewer than 5% of respondents said their company had a rigorous, disciplined process for focusing top management's time on the most important issues ⁵. A strategy team that owns that agenda has a job nobody else is doing. The corporate strategy team page makes the full case that the executive agenda is the team's real product; the charter is how you write that down and defend it.

The charter also settles an argument that otherwise runs for years: whether the team writes the strategy or helps the executives write it. Henry Mintzberg's answer was that planners should contribute around the strategy-making process rather than inside it, as analysts who supply data, catalysts who help managers think strategically, and programmers who turn a strategy into concrete steps ⁴. You do not have to agree with him. You do have to choose, in writing.

The template

Twelve fields. The builder below the opening of this page assembles the core of it; the table is the full version. A field you cannot fill is a conversation you need to have with the CEO.

How to write it

1. Start with field 3, not field 1List the decisions first. A mandate written before the decisions tends to say “drive strategic excellence.” A mandate written after them can say “improve the portfolio and capital allocation decisions the executive committee makes, and get them made on time.”
2. Write field 5 with the people who will inherit the workEvery item on the not-ours list goes to someone: FP&A takes budget sense-checks, corporate development takes deal models, marketing takes competitor one-pagers for sales. Agree the handoff with them before the CEO signs, or the requests come straight back.
3. Mark each service own, lead or coordinateRobert Kaplan and David Norton's office of strategy management made this distinction across nine processes: some were its natural turf, some it should eventually absorb, and some, such as planning and budgeting, workforce alignment and best-practice sharing, stayed with other functions while the office ensured they were aligned with strategy ¹. The labels stop the team from claiming work it cannot control.
4. Choose a mode deliberatelyIn 24 interviews with chief strategy officers at FTSE 100 companies, Taman Powell and Duncan Angwin found two dimensions of variation: whether the CSO focused on formulating strategy or executing it, and whether the CSO facilitated others or enacted the process with their own team ². Write which one your team is. A team that is expected to be an internal consultant but staffed and measured as a program office will fail both expectations.
5. Secure the seatKaplan and Norton found successful offices either reported directly to the CEO or sat under the CFO or COO with a dotted line to the CEO; they called an office three levels below the CEO even less desirable and unsustainable ¹. If field 7 cannot say direct access, say so honestly and lower field 3 to match.
6. Fix the cadence to the executive calendarTie field 8 to the meetings where decisions happen. In Kaplan and Norton's description, the office briefs the CEO before the monthly management meeting on the strategic issues to put on its agenda, then follows up afterward on the actions agreed ¹.
7. Get it signed, and publish field 5The CEO signs. Field 5 is shared with every executive, because it only works if the people asking know the answer in advance.

A filled-in charter

The company is invented. Notice that the not-ours list is longer than the services list.

Field 10's “about a fifth of capacity” is our own rule of thumb, not a benchmark. Some reserve is necessary, because a strategy team that refuses every urgent request from the CEO will not keep its seat for long. The reserve is what makes field 5 politically survivable: the team can say no to the competitor one-pager because it said yes to the Friday memo.

Choosing the operating model

Fields 6, 7, 9 and 10 together are the operating model. Three choices matter most, and each has a failure mode.

On size, the only published figures we know come from Kaplan and Norton's work on offices of strategy management: an office running all nine of their processes typically had six to eight full-time staff, and most organizations had ten or fewer people in the office ¹. Their goal, they wrote, was not to build a large new corporate bureaucracy ¹. Treat those numbers as one study of one model, not a norm for every strategy team.

The most consequential choice is the one Mankins and Richard Steele pointed to: whether strategy runs as a calendar or as a decision agenda. In their survey of 156 large companies, those that reviewed strategy continuously and by issue reported an average of 6.1 major strategic decisions a year, against 2.5 for those running an annual review by business unit ³. That is a survey correlation, not proof that the process caused the difference. Still, a charter whose field 8 is only an annual planning cycle has chosen the calendar, whether it meant to or not.

The case against chartering a strategy team

The strongest objection is that a strategy team's value is its flexibility. The CEO's needs change every month. A team that answers a request with “that's not in our charter” sounds like a bureaucracy, and a CEO will route around it to a consultant or a chief of staff within a quarter.

That is a real risk, and it is why the charter above holds capacity in reserve and is renegotiated every six months. But look at what flexibility without a charter produces: the opening log of forty-one requests and a division decision nobody had time for. The team that says yes to everything is not flexible. It is fully booked by whoever asked first.

The deeper answer is about whose priorities set the team's week. Without a charter, the team's priorities are the sum of everyone's requests, weighted by seniority and urgency. With one, they are the CEO's decision agenda, which is the only list that should outrank the others. The charter does not make the team rigid. It makes the CEO's choices visible, including the choice to interrupt them.

Before the CEO signs

• Field 1 names decisions, not activities or values.
• Field 3 lists at least three decisions, each written as a question with a rough date.
• Field 5 lists at least three kinds of work, and each has a new owner who has agreed to take it.
• Field 6 picks a mode, and fields 10 and 11 are consistent with it.
• Field 7 states the real reporting line, not the aspirational one.
• Field 11 measures decisions or allocations, not documents produced.
• Field 12 has a date.

For what goes in field 11, see how to measure the strategy function. For a quick check of where the team stands today, the strategy function maturity assessment scores it on whether its work shapes decisions.

Go back to the log of forty-one requests. Every one of them was somebody's priority. The charter is how the strategy team gets to have one of its own.

Questions

What is a strategy team charter?

A strategy team charter is a short agreement, signed by the CEO, that sets out what the corporate strategy team is for: the decisions it exists to improve, the services it provides, the work it will turn down and who does that work instead, its reporting line, its working rhythm, how it will be judged and when the charter is reviewed. It is the team's operating model in writing.

What should a strategy team operating model include?

At minimum: the mode the team works in (formulating or executing strategy, facilitating others or doing the work itself), which processes it owns, leads or only coordinates, its reporting line and access to the CEO, its fixed cadence tied to executive meetings, the interfaces with finance, corporate development and business units, and the size and shape of the team.

How big should a corporate strategy team be?

There is no reliable benchmark. The one published figure we know is from Kaplan and Norton's research on offices of strategy management: an office running all nine of their strategy management processes typically had six to eight full-time staff, and most had ten or fewer. Size the team to the decisions it serves and the processes it owns, not to a norm.

Why include work the strategy team will not do?

Because requests arrive constantly and the urgent, small ones crowd out the large decisions the team exists to serve. Listing the work the team will turn down, with the team that takes it instead, protects the decision agenda and tells executives the answer before they ask. Holding some capacity for unplanned CEO requests keeps the list politically workable.

Where to go next

• What a Corporate Strategy Team Actually Does
• Strategy Function Metrics: Count Decisions, Follow the Money
• Strategy vs. Corporate Development vs. BizOps: Who Owns What
• Headquarters Strategy
• Governance